Help Center/ Host Security Service/ API Reference/ Permissions and Supported Actions/ Introduction
Updated on 2025-12-04 GMT+08:00
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Introduction

This section describes fine-grained permissions management for your HSS resources. If your Huawei ID does not need individual IAM users, you may skip this section.

With IAM, you can control access to specific Huawei Cloud resources from principals (IAM users, user groups, agencies, or trust agencies). There are two types of IAM authorization: role/policy-based authorization and identity policy-based authorization.

The differences and relationships between the two authorization models are as follows:

Table 1 Differences between the two types of authorization

Name

Relationship

Permission

Auth service

Scenario

Role/Policy

User-permission-authorization scope
  • System-defined role
  • System policy
  • Custom policies

Granting a role or policy to a subject

To authorize a user, you need to add it to a user group first and then specify the scope of authorization. It is hard to provide fine-grained permissions control using authorization by user groups and a limited number of condition keys. This method is suitable for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Identity policy

User-policy
  • System policy
  • Custom identity policies
  • Granting an identity policy to a subject
  • Attaching identity policies to principals

You can authorize a user by attaching an identity policy to it. User-specific authorization and a variety of key conditions allow for more fine-grained permissions control. However, this model can be hard to set up. It requires a certain amount of expertise and is suitable for medium-sized and large enterprises.

Assume that you want to grant IAM users the permissions needed to create ECSs in CN North-Beijing4 and OBS buckets in CN South-Guangzhou. With role/policy-based authorization, the administrator needs to create two custom policies and assign both to the IAM users. With identity policy-based authorization, the administrator only needs to create one custom identity policy and configure the condition key g:RequestedRegion for the policy, and then attach the policy to the users or grant the users the access permissions to the specified regions. Identity policy-based authorization is more flexible than role/policy-based authorization.

Policies/identity policies and actions in the two authorization scenarios are not interoperable. You are advised to use the identity policy-based authorization model.

If you use IAM users in your account to call an API, the IAM users must be granted the required permissions. The permissions required for calling an API are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users who have been granted permissions allowing the actions can call the API successfully.

Take the vulnerability query via API as an example. With identity policy-based authorization, an IAM user must have the hss:vuls:list action in their permissions to call the API. With identity policy-based authorization, an IAM user must have the hss:vulnerability:listVulnerabilities action to call the API.

Parent Topic: Permissions and Supported Actions